


Final Strain

by orphan



Series: Frankenstein and the Newt [8]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Kaiju Newton Geiszler, M/M, Not Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, Too Soon: The Fic, basically all plot sorry monsterfuckers, gratuitous abuse of hong kong tourist traps, slightly more than canon typical gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:34:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25757440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: And then everything got worse...
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Series: Frankenstein and the Newt [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/377038
Comments: 18
Kudos: 32





	1. “Once you’ve seen one parade you’ve seen them all.”

**Author's Note:**

> So ahahaha you remember that time in 2016 I wrote a silly fic set in Hong Kong about a deadly global viral pandemic? And then four years later my holiday to Hong Kong had to get cancelled because of an _actual_ deadly global viral pandemic? Wow ahahaha. Yeah. About that...
> 
>  _There's a cold streak living (inside us)_  
>  _There's no rainbows... just bullets and bones_  
>  _If you[want to rise up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHj_WC_IzFc)._

It starts in November, though they don’t know it at the time. What they do know is that currently it’s New Year’s, of the lunar variety, and there’s a bunch of them, maybe twenty all up, piling into the MTR on the way to TST to see the parade. It’s been storming on and off all week but there’d been a tinge of blue just before the sun went down, and the forecast is for the weather to hold through the night.

Hermann hadn’t wanted to risk it, or the crowds, or the staying up late (“Honestly, once you’ve seen one parade you’ve seen them all”), meaning it’s the first time Newt’s gone into the city without his speaking-mouth-and-emotional-support human since The Article. The fact he’s in the middle of a noisy crowd of j-techs, Rangers, lab staff, and LOCCENT personnel non-withstanding, he still feels . . . naked, somehow. And not just in the literal sense which, yes, because it’s not exactly like kaijin wear clothes (he has bracelets, though! And rings! And even one of his old ties tied around his left wrist! It counts!) but more importantly in the sense that there’s no armed guard and no paparazzi (at least not at first) and this is just him, going into the city, with a group of coworkers, because he _can_.

It’s . . . weird.

It’s weird and Newt’s determined that it shouldn’t be, resolutely focusing on Tendo and Mako and the Larsons and not on the people who point and stare and, occasionally, shriek when their group goes past. Because it’s Chinese New Year, baby, and the parade is happening and Newt is going to be _there_ , first time in over a decade, and so help him but there’s no force in this universe or any other that’s going to stop him from having Eff. Eue. En. Fun.

They bail from the MTR at Tsim Sha Tsui, have to loop around the station a few times until they find an exit Newt can actually get out of. They’re greeted at the top by Alison Choi and a half-a-dozen other miscellaneous family members, ages ranging from fifteen weeks to ninety-three. There are hugs, and introductions, and Newt tries not to notice that most everyone here knows each other except for him.

“It’s so good to finally see you again,” says Alison, whom he met properly maybe once before, sometime when the Breach was still open and she still worked at the ‘Dome.

“It’s good to be out again,” he signs, completely sincerely. Tendo translates and Alison laughs, squeezes his small hand and gives him a kiss just behind the nares, and it’s okay, it’s fine. He’s here, and it’s fine, and Tendo knows a place just off Nathan Road that does ice cream doughnuts, and they’ve got a little time before the parade so haul ass into some half-closed mall and order a dozen of the things, in every flavor from Matcha to Tear Gas, heaping helpings of heart attack Newt looks at with a vague sort of academic distaste now all he can smell is the chemical reek of indigestible sugars and decaying fat.

On a whim, he grabs the cardboard cartons and books it for the doors, outraged shouts and laughter following in his wake. His hands are full, all of them, meaning he’s running on two legs meaning the humans actually have a chance of catching up. Or more than a chance, as it turns out, when Newt rounds a corner on Mody and runs straight into the freakin’ Marshal.

He stares at Hansen and Hansen stares at him, anxious pedestrians on cellphones for two blocks in every direction, half a dozen j-techs and pilots coming up fast behind him. Eventually, Hansen says:

“Mate, you shouldn’t have,” and takes one of the boxes from Newt’s pile. He’s taking his first oversized bite of a Tear Gas and Chocolate doughnut when everyone else catches up. “Delicious,” is the verdict, and Newt doesn’t even try and resist when people grab the rest of the boxes from his hands and redistribute them back to their proper owners.

* * *

The music starts not long after and their group—grown somehow larger again—stakes out a segment of road between Chungking and the SOGO to watch. The crowds are wary of them at first—are wary of Newt, at first—but soon the mass of bodies and good ol’ Hong Kong practicality wins out, and they’re crushed in on all sides, strangers tripping over Newt’s tail as they go past. Newt spent Christmas in London with Vanessa and Lena and Dad and Uncle Illia, New Year’s in Bavaria with the Gottleibs (minus Lars), but he’s forgotten how . . . visceral humans are. How much they cough and splutter and wheeze and _breathe_ , the hotwet carbon stink of them pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the same place. It’s not . . . bad, exactly, and he tells himself the uneasy drone he can feel below his gut is anxiety at being out, at being _seen_ and filmed and gossiped about and he has eyes everywhere, now—on his head and his arms and his chest and his haunches—and he can see it, all of it, from every angle and—

_(Jaeger oil and fried wiring, half a city away. The smell of sweat and wool and, “It’s fine, Newton, you’re doing fine,” muttered into a recalcitrant coupling, meticulously flayed by patient, long-boned fingers.)_

“Yo, Newt. Do us a solid, brother.”

—and Tendo is handing him a child.

Newt blinks, and the child blinks back; big brown eyes and ice-cream smeared mouth.

“Can’t see over the crowd,” Tendo explains, and . . . right. Right, of course.

Which is how Newt ends up standing, big arms out and up like a flexing bodybuilder, supporting half a dozen children above the crowd as the parade starts to trickle past.

And, thing is? Hermann is kinda right; seen one parade, seen them all. A bog standard formula of pop music and traditional drumming, of scantily dressed ladies, of lion- and dragon-dancers, of corporate sponsorship and Hello Kitty and LEDs and Newt _loves_ it. Even as his ocelli are poked by sticky child-fingers and his gills kicked by free-swinging trainers and his tail keeps getting freaking _stepped on_ by passers-by.

There are jugglers and acrobats and a float with SUGAR☆STARR, belting out over-choreographed dance moves and lip-syncing to their latest interchangeable commercial pop hit. The children scream in joy and somewhere to the left someone _keeps coughing_ and everything is pounding sound and dazzling light and the smell of dusty faux fur as one of the lions nuzzles Newt’s snout, in solidarity maybe, and a hundred camera flashes go off as Newt throws a peace sign with his small hands, just because.

And then everything goes to shit. Again.

* * *

Seasonal flu, they’d called it. Spread through half the city, happens every year, nothing to worry about except for the very old and the very young and the very sick. There’s a vaccine, of course, but who has time to bother with that? So many vaccines nowadays, between the flu and the k-virus and everything else. _Something’s_ gotta get you in the end, right? No point worrying too much.

Except it’s not the flu.

The first victim, they trace later, is Jason Kwan Tin Lok. Fifty-three, delivery driver, bachelor. Lived alone in a tiny apartment in Broadview Court. Quiet but friendly, no police record, in generally good health. According to coworkers he’d developed migraines and a cough, about a month prior; had started getting strange and withdrawn. Stopped talking. People had worried but hadn’t wanted to pry, and Kwan had had no close relatives in the city to take care of him.

At 5:43pm on 31 January, Kwan had taken the MTR into TST. By then, his cough was crippling enough for other passengers on the subway to remember him, pale and drawn and shivering, hunched over inside a huge puffer coat. From there, he’d walked to Kowloon Park and sat, unmoving and staring at nothing, waiting for the crowds to gather and the parade to start. At 8:37pm, he’d risen, walked straight into the crowd and approached a woman named Natasha Rinne (forty-eight, banker, watching the parade with her wife and two children). Then he’d grabbed her, spun her around and—opening a mouth filled down the throat with shark-sharp teeth, opening it so wide he’d split open the skin of his cheeks—had bitten off half her face.

Jason Kwan and Natasha Rinne, the first two victims. And not the last.

* * *

Newt feels it like a punch in the dick, and the unexpected jolt of it sends him staggering. It’s not as loud as before, not the endless roaring he’d felt with Aurora but it’s _close_ , and suddenly he _knows_ , down to his glass-cored bones, that the low hum of disquiet he’s been feeling isn’t coming from him.

It’s from the hive.

He’s not alone.

He doesn’t think. _Can’t_ think. Instinct and blind panic and the hot throbbing of the Anteverse, and Newt’s arms are full of children and there are humans pressing in on all sides and suddenly everything is rotting meat and _parasites_ and oh god Newt has to get out of there.

He takes one shuddering step backwards, then two. It’s impossible not to notice, even above the music and the screaming and the crowd, and he gets a, “Hey, man. You okay?” from one of the young pilots. Angela. Her name is Angela, and he has exactly enough presence of mind to stutter out one single word before he’s shifting his grip and turning tail, literally, and is _gone_.

_(Half a city away, shaking hands put down a half-soldered circuit board and pick up a phone. Hermann sends one text message, badly misspelled, stands, and runs to LOCCENT as fast as his aching leg will carry him.)_

A panicked kaijin carrying an armful of screaming children is not exactly a mundane sight, even for Hong Kong, but no one wants to get in his way, either; the crowd is dense but it parts in front of him, screaming, and some dim part of Newt is aware of the footsteps following behind, of people shouting his name. He has no idea where he’s going bar “away”—he’s inside, then outside, then inside again—and no idea what he’s going to do when he gets there, but the problem is solved for him when he bursts out onto Minden Row and a huge black car screeches to a halt, cutting off his path.

Three people jump out, sunglasses and tailored suits, and one of them holds up a wrist to show Newt her tattoo.

“Boss says you need an evac for some kids,” she says, and her voice barely even shakes. And that . . . it brings Newt back to himself. Sort of.

Hannibal’s people. Hermann texted them. They must’ve been close to get here so fast but, well. So is half the city.

Newt nods, suddenly painfully aware he’s carrying an armful of other people’s children. He puts them down, carefully, even as a good dozen of their parents catch up and come to a breathless stop around him.

“It’s happened, hasn’t it?” says the Vulture, eyes darting between Newt and his newly arrived pursuers. “This . . . it . . .”

She can’t bring herself to say it, but Newt nods anyway.

“Get everyone you can back to the ‘Dome,” he signs. He’s not even sure anyone nearby can understand him, and before he can find out he hears the screaming start in earnest. Not the joyful calling of a crowd or the yelps as he’d passed through it, but the shrill, animal sound of agony and terror. “I have to—” he manages, at the same time the Vulture says:

“Go, go! We’ll handle this.”

So he goes. Back to Nathan Road, back to the screaming and the sick pounding signal in his gut. The crowd has caught wind something’s wrong, is fleeing in earnest and this time people crash into Newt in their panic. Doing so doesn’t help their mental state but he tries to catch as many as he can, help them up, stop them from getting trampled or worse. What else can he do? Defiant to the last, a hot ball of outrage and horror, spitting in the black-hole faces of the avatars of authority themselves.

The Anteverse wants him to kill all humans? Well then they can watch Newt fucking save them, instead.

He sees his first kaijin—his first one not in the mirror—in the dim halls of Chungking Mansions, between an abandoned currency exchange and a shuttered store selling knockoff hardshell suitcases. The kaijin is wearing the legs of a lion and is thrashing desperately at the lion’s front half, who’s valiantly trying to hold it off by beating it with the blood-smeared head, jaw flapping and eyes rolling grotesquely. The front-half keeps calling the legs’s name, begging him to stop, to come to his senses, as people flee around them.

Legs gives one final lunge and Head screams and Newt’s claw catches the former, knocking him flying against the glass of the exchange.

 _“Come on!”_ he screams at it, broadcast in pure thought and backed with a roar. _“You wanna go? You wanna fuckin’ fight? Fight something your own goddamn species!”_

Half of Legs’s face has been ripped off, the skin underneath the hard, charcoal-black scutes of a kaiju. It has no lips, raw teeth grinning a death-skull grin and there’s nothing human Newt can feel beneath the bulging, mad blue eye.

Newt tries, anyway, _pushing_ forward into the static roar of the hive. Lucas, Head had been calling, and Newt screams the name now, desperate to find something echoing back, _anything_. Because this isn’t right. This isn’t like Aurora and it isn’t even like his own mind. There’s just nothing, just void, just mad alien violence and—

_(“He’s trying to reach them,” Hermann mutters. Someone’s made him a cup of tea and he cradles it in shaking hands. “But there’s nothing there to reach. Nothing human left.”)_

—and Legs lashes out, screaming an awful, half-human scream. Newt catches his, its, arm easily; it’s the left and the hand is wrapped in the remains of fraying bandages. The thumb and first two fingers are stiff and rigid, distal and middle phalanges fused into razor-sharp claws, protruding grotesquely from the remains and bloodied, ragged skin.

 _“Oh god I can’t,”_ Newt thinks, bile and acid rising in his craw both figuratively and literally. _“I can’t hurt them. They’re people. I can’t . . . I_ can’t _—”_

Legs tries to pull its arm free. It isn’t as a strong as Newt and it shouldn’t work, it shouldn’t, except there’s a horrific wet tearing and Newt _feels_ the bones and muscle slide out from his grasp, leaving behind a sleeve of empty human flesh.

Legs stumbles backwards, shaking its newly-freed arm— its newly freed _arms_ , two vicious, whip-cord thin limbs separating out from the cocoon of one.

 _“Please,”_ Newt begs it. _“Please, don’t do this. We can help you. I can—”_

Something slams into his side, not heavy but _sharp_ , piercing hide and muscle. He roars in shock and pain, stumbling sideways. He grabs at his flank and his claw closes around another grotesque pile of rubbery muscle and torn cloth and bleeding flesh, and he throws it blindly. The second kaijin’s teeth and claws take a good chunk of his side with them as it goes, and it’s only then Newt notices there are more. A dozen maybe, writhing around each other on four limbs and six, hissing and snarling through half-stripped faces.

And Newt . . .

Newt is bigger, and he’s stronger, and he’s spent hundreds of hours, training with Mako, training the Rangers. He knows how to destroy like a kaiju and fight like a human and against one opponent, or two, or three . . . he could take them. But six? Twelve?

He kills his first not long after. It’s not intentional, not quite, but there are too many teeth and too many claws and the floor is slick with Blue and Hermann screams with every new gash. Newt lashes out with a fist and catches one of the kaijin’s skulls against a wall. The wall shatters and so does the skull and there’s something . . . wrong about it, something hollow, and even with its head gone to kaijin stumbles drunkenly to its feet, long tails freed from its skin and thrashing behind it. The second time, Newt drives a fist through its abdomen, right through the secondary brain, and _this_ time he feels the hot, slick slurp of pulverized organs and _this_ time when the kaijin falls, it doesn’t get back up.

The others howl at the feel of it, at the feel of that black pit of static, finally spluttering out, and lunge. Newt knocks three aside and rolls back himself, dorsal plates slamming into a shopfront in a cascade of brightly colored saris. For a moment he’s blinded by orange and pink and gold and it’s then he hears:

“Doctor Geiszler! Get down!” And then a dull pop and a hiss as something metal skitters across the floor.

Newt just has time to register the gas canister before the calcite hits him and he sneezes, eyes watering and lungs closing against the burn.

Hands grab him, _human_ hands, and through the haze Newt blinks up into the helmeted face of a PPDC Ranger.

A Ranger, but not a pilot. These are ground troops, trained to fight kaijin, the PPDC’s worst and most dire contingency.

“Doctor Geiszler!” the Ranger says again, voice muffled through his helmet. “Doctor Geiszler we have to get you out of here.” Through the smoke, Newt can see more dark shapes pouring into the corridor, hear the tromp of their boots and the sharp firing of their modified weapons, scaled down from Jaeger size.

Newt stands, stumbling, and lets himself be pulled out of the building by the Ranger. They get onto the street before his limbs give out, and he crashes to the pavement. The air is thick with calcite, the chalk-dust bombs the Rangers have been using to corral the kaijin, and Newt starts sneezing and can’t seem to stop.

“Shit,” says the Ranger. “Shit, we’ve gotta get—”

It’s as far as he gets before a sleek, blue-black form launches itself out of the smoke. Newt gets off a half-barked warning but the Ranger has already brought up his rifle. He fires three shots, neat and sharp and bright and loud, and the kaijin’s body crashes to the ground not three feet from Newt.

Half its head is gone, skull opened to the world. Skull, but no brain; there’s nothing inside the cavity but a layer of thin blue slime. Across the city, Hermann throws up all over the LOCCENT floor.

Newt, meanwhile, raises a fist, and slams it into the midsection of the still-living kaijin, even as it struggles to its feet, pulverizing the secondary brain—the _only_ brain—and putting the thing out of its misery.

“Shit. Fuck. Body shots only!” Newt hears the Ranger bark into his comm. “Target the— God. Shoot ‘em in the dick. They’ve got . . . there’s nothing in their heads. No brain. And— and Jesus we need . . . we need— Whoever the fuck knows first aid on a goddamn kaiju! I’ve got Geiszler but he’s in bad shape; they fucked him up good.”

 _I’m fine,_ Newt wants to say. _They build us tough_. And it’s true, he should know. But the Ranger is right, too; Newt doesn’t quite feel pain the way he used to but the feeling he does feel he’s feeling now, everywhere, and the Blue pooling beneath him is getting to be a serious safety hazard.

Somehow, he manages to stand, manages to lope half a block and, at the Ranger’s urging, turn down Middle Road where a group is rushing up to meet them. Two more Rangers and a blur of white hazmat suit and another smear Newt can’t quite make out through watering eyes until it gets close enough to resolve into the jeans and leather jacket of the Marshal.

“Jesus, what the fuck happened?” the latter says, skidding to a halt. He reaches out as if to touch, then thinks better of it.

“Sir! Found him in the Mansions.” From the Ranger. “Got jumped by a dozen of those fucking things but was holding his own.”

“I didn’t— I didn’t want to kill them,” Newt’s hands say, almost all on their own. “They’re just people. They’re just— That could’ve been me. It _was_ me. I can feel them, I should’ve . . . I should’ve felt them. I knew something was wrong but it doesn’t feel like before, not like with Aurora, there’s no . . . no _nothing_ there, it just buzzes and buzzes and _buzzes_ and I can’t stop it and oh god there’s more they’re still out there I have to— I have to—”

“Doctor Geiszler! Enough!”

Newt blinks, then sneezes, then blinks again. Then lowers himself, slowly and painfully, back down onto his haunches.

“What you _have_ to do,” Hansen continues, voice hard and sharp, “it sit there, get patched up, get decontaminated, and get your scaly arse back to the Shatterdome, do you hear me?”

And somewhere there are gunshots and helicopters and the hideous _whoop whoop_ of the attack siren and the air is thick with ammonia and chalk and it’s been twenty minutes, max, since this all started and somehow, _somehow_ , Newt manages to nod.

Hansen softens, just a touch. “Good,” he says. “Leave . . . leave the rest of the ground clean-up to the Rangers, all right? They’ve got it under control. You’ll be needed soon enough, but not getting torn up out here.”

“How . . . how many dead?”

A sigh. “Less than there could’ve been. Near as we can tell, mostly they were interested in finding _you_.” A pause, then: “You saved a lot of people, doing whatever you did. But Newt? Don’t you bloody dare ever do it again, you understand me?”

“They had nothing.” Like Newt can’t stop himself from saying it. “Nothing inside. They hollowed them out.” He looks at the corpse, pulled to the side, currently being examined by more hazmatted scientists. _His_ scientists, somewhere beneath the plastic and rubber.

Hansen is watching, too. “Whoever these people were,” he eventually says, “I think they’ve been dead a lot longer than just today. That’s where I’m going to need you, understand? There’s going to be questions, big questions, from big people. I need you in a state to give me answers.”

Newt nods. “Yeah. Yeah . . . okay.”

“Good. Get yourself fixed up, then get home. You’ll have ten hours, max, before the entire world comes down on us like a bloody Cat 5 over this. I want a good news story for them when they do.”

* * *

So Newt gets patched up, and decontaminated, and piled into a truck headed back to the ‘Dome.

“Gonna have some funky scars from this, Doc.” Vicente Otero, one of Newt’s team, had turned out to be the designated first aid specialist. Newt is mostly clean, or at least non-toxic, blasted with HC-Orange and with all his biggest gashes plugged by the silicon sealant he’s been using on himself since realizing it was impossible to find stitches that wouldn’t just melt in his flesh.

Newt just sighs. He still aches, everywhere, the biggest chunks—taken from his left arm, right leg, tail—throb hot and distracting, and his eyes and lungs still itch and burn from the chalk. But his head feels . . . clearer. And the incessant Anteverse buzz is gone from his gut. He’s trying not to think too hard about why.

They’ve found sixteen kaijin so far. Fourteen in the area of the parade and two who looked to’ve turned before managing to get there. So far there’s six dead—six humans dead—about twenty people in critical condition, and a hundred or so more with minor wounds, mostly sprains and abrasions from the crush to escape. Like everyone keeps telling him, it could’ve been worse.

“Doctor? We’ve got a match from the field team. It’s K3T12.” Another one of Newt’s half-hazmatted people, Vivian Li. Vi had been with their original group, had run to the nearest PPDC vehicle as soon as they’d shown up, ready to suit up and get to work.

“From Foshan?” Newt asks, and gets a nod in return.

Huh. _“Hear that, Herms? Means this one’s on me, not you.”_

_(“Don’t be ridiculous,” comes the reply, muttered to the LOCCENT floor. People have long since stopped worrying at Doctor Hermann Gottlieb, PhD., talking to seemingly nothing. “This is no-one on Earth’s ‘fault’ and we both know it.”)_

_“Sure sure. That’s why you’ve been beating yourself up since this started, wondering why your dumb model didn’t predict it.”_

Because the model _had_ predicted Foshan, back in November. They’d ended up with a smidge over four hundred dead and hadn’t bothered looking for survivors since everyone knew the k-virus was fatal. Fuck.

“Trace the . . . the victims,” Newt signs. “See if they were in the area at the time.”

Vi nods. Not quite as young and wide-eyed as she’d been when she’d first joined them, a million years ago now. But still just as eager and stubborn and bold. “Already on it. Some of the bodies still had ID on them. They’ve traced at least two; Jason Kwan and Hu Fang. Former a delivery driver, latter an academic. Both would’ve been in Foshan during the outbreak.”

“No vaccine?”

“No. Looks like. Hu Fang, uh. He was an antivaxer. Thought the virus was, like, a conspiracy or whatever.”

Of course he did. Newt sighs, and closes his eyes, and can’t even feel anything in particular at the information.

Still, that’s Hansen’s good news story; K3T12 has spectrum, and it’s definitely A-origin.

“Pull samples from whatever you can,” Newt signs. “Start sequencing. I want to know how this thing stabilized and I want to know why it only did it in _these_ people, not anyone else.”

“Right. I’ll let Doctor Ng know.” A pause, then: “We’ll beat this,” Vi says, and there it is. The same fire Newt remembers from the belly of blacked-out ship. “We’ll beat _them_.”

Newt just nods, saying nothing, and praying for the certainty of youth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we go. It only took like a hundred thousand words but we got to the kung-fu beatdown in Chungking Mansions. Truly we have reached Peak Hong Kong...
> 
> Also yes I absolutely stole the Infiltrators from Skull_Bearer's [Anteverse Refugee](https://archiveofourown.org/series/55561) series. Which if you're reading this you've almost certainly already read but, y'know. Should totally go read again.
> 
> _Invaders[must die](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiqFcc_l_Kk)._


	2. “If it weren’t for me you would’ve gone mad years ago.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains descriptions of an autopsy, so there's slightly more body horror and gore than usual. Also mild slur warning as a bad man says some bad words near the end.

_“They’re testing us.”_

Later, back at the Shatterdome. It’s Newt and Hermann and a lab full of scientists even if, in this one moment, it’s mostly just them, together, watching the first news reports begin to stream in.

“You think there’s going to be another attack.”

_“I think there already has been.”_

“Mm. Unless you’re looking older, your only candidate is Lampang, and that outbreak was contained.” The Thai government, deciding not to even flirt with the idea of fucking around, had evacuated the entire area, nuked the whole province with h-fields, and engaged in a mass—and sometimes not entirely voluntary—nationwide vaccination program to boot.

Newt scowls, because Hermann being right is always a scowl-worthy event.

_“They’re going to send a daikaiju next time, too. This was just . . . just a test run. And they kept it dormant. We didn’t even know it_ could _be dormant!”_ Growing under the skin, eating people from the inside out, rebuilding them from within, maintaining cover like some perverse cordyceps until the time was right.

With Newt, the transformation had been eight weeks of immediate, Cronenbergian horror show; flesh distorted and swollen as Newt’s bodyweight doubled, then tripled, the more. As limbs sprouted at odd angles and nails peeled off and teeth dropped out, pushed aside by the replacements festering beneath. Obvious and agonizing. They’d assumed the next time would be the same. Stupid. So fucking _stupid_.

_“There could be hundreds out there.”_ And there it is. The Bad News. _“And we’d never know. I can’t . . . I can’t_ feel _them, not properly. They fuckin’_ learned _. From me. How I failed. How they could ‘_ do better _’.”_ He practically spits the words, even without a voice, claws closing around the back of a chair hard enough to crack plastic and puncture fabric.

“I think this is catastrophizing,” Hermann says, eyebrow raised in genteel scorn for the property damage. “We can only deal with the data we have, not the data we wish we did. And if you are right, we’ll simply deploy the Jaeger at every outbreak and wait.”

_“And if they do open another Breach big enough, kick a nuke down this one, too, and watch them choke on it a second time?”_

Hermann sighs. “People have certainly proposed worse plans.”

The television runs cellphone footage of Nathan Road. Newt sees himself, feral and monstrous, lurching down the street with an armful of screaming children.

“They know you were saving them,” Hermann says, far too gently.

_“Was I?”_ Had he been? Or had that been Hermann, back in the Shatterdome. Feeling Newt’s panic and making his own decisions based upon it.

“Yes,” says Hermann, as cold and as certain and mathematics. “That a part of you was . . . uncertain as the your methods is besides the point.”

_“If it weren’t for you—”_

“If it weren’t for me you would’ve gone mad years ago,” comes the snapped reply. “But that isn’t the case. Again, work with the reality you have, Newton, not the one you fear.”

_“Jesus. Fuck you too, dude.”_

Another sigh, a pair of rolled eyes. But a cool hand, too, resting on Newt’s shoulder.

“We’ll get through this,” Hermann says. “We’ve know it was coming. We’ve prepared. The PPDC has prepared. The _world_ has.”

_But when does it end?_ Newt does not get to ask. Or, rather, does, because the bond, the parasite, is like that. But as he does:

“Gents? Showtime.”

Hansen, in full dress uniform, standing in the lab’s doorway. Hermann nods, and the hand on Newt’s shoulder pushes against his hide.

“Come on. Time for the dog and pony show.”

* * *

They have their press conference, and it isn’t even all that bad. Footage has been going around of Newt fighting the other kaijin and a particularly enterprising local reporter even managed to dig up the lion dancer’s head-half. He’d made a statement of both thanks to Newt and condolences to the family of his now-dead friend, and the general narrative is one of the PPDC saving the city, again. It probably doesn’t hurt that Newt’s only just peeled off the putty from the his wounds, the gashes underneath ugly blue-black warnings to anyone in the room feeling . . . uncharitable with their questioning.

He gets up and says some things, through Hermann, because apparently now that the PPDC has stopped pretending he doesn’t exist he’s their new favorite media talking head instead. Yes, the vaccine is effective against K3T12. Yes, it’s Anteverse in origin, no Earthly bioterrorism involved. No, it doesn’t transmit human-to-human. Yes, his team is working to determine why it only seems to have stabilized in a tiny percentage of infected individuals. Yes, testing is effective and available and anyone concerned should see their doctor immediately.

And then:

“Is it true the PPDC has adopted a strategy of elimination with the converted victims of the k-virus? As a sufferer and a survivor yourself, how do you defend that stance?”

Jack Ho. Older, native Hongkonger, writes for the _Post_.Notoriously anti-PPDC, or anti-kaiju, or maybe just anti-Newt, and they’ve butted heads a few times before.

The mood in the room changes, just a fraction, at the question. Newt tries not to feel his scabbed-over wounds itching.

Hermann is spluttering. “Excuse _you_! I think that’s quite—”

_“No. No, let me answer it.”_

Which earns him an epic, frog-lipped bitchface and a hissed, “You do not need to _justify_ yourself to—”

_“I know. I just . . .”_ He shrugs, not bothering to articulate in words what Hermann can feel right out of his head.

Hermann, who makes a _tssch_ of disapproval, but who turns back around and falls back in his own mind as Newt uses his voice to say:

“It sucks, actually. Yeah. I hate it. It’s total shit.” There’s a sharp intake of breath around the room. Not at the words, so much, but at the voice. They’re used to Newt signing and Hermann “translating,” in his own voice. Most would never have heard _this_ ; have heard Newt’s words and Newt’s accent, even Newt’s body language, coming so directly.

“But the victims of K3T12? They aren’t like me. My strain, the Anteverse fucked up; they left me this.” He taps the side of his head, in both bodies, hears a dozen cameras fluttering to capture the moment. “Yesterday’s victims? Nothing. Hollow upstairs; the virus melted the brain out weeks ago. For all intents and purposes, the humans they’d been were dead. They were just . . . bodies. Running on a kind of fucked-up autopilot. If we could have reached them, if there’d still been something left inside? I would eat my own _tail_ if it would’ve brought them back. But . . .” He shrugs, helpless.

“What Doctor Geiszler is saying,” Hansen adds, “is that, regardless of this new development, the k-virus remains one hundred percent fatal. We cannot cure it, or treat it. We can only prevent it, and we _can_ prevent it. Please, to everyone: Get. Vaccinated. It is the most effective weapon we have against this threat.”

The room erupts in questions again, and camera flashes, and not one single person manages to miss Jack Ho’s pointed, “But it’s not a _hundred_ percent fatal, is it?” Or the way he stares straight at Newt as he says it.

* * *

And the worst part? After that . . . nothing.

Or, well. Not _nothing_ nothing; there’s still plenty of samples to analyze and a row of corpses in the freezer. Every single family they’d managed to find had consented to donating their relatives to the cause, some more voluntarily than others but, well, this is Hong Kong, and it’s the apocalypse, and people know how things go.

How things are currently going is Newt, standing in a stark white room, frozen by something other than the industrial-strength air conditioning.

“ . . . Doctor?”

Newt blinks, flesh and hide blurring in and out of half-flayed focus.

“Yeah,” he signs. “Yeah, sorry.”

Doctor Armah, Newt’s forensic pathologist, gives him a sympathetic look. “If you would prefer, Joel and I can preform the autopsy and you may review the report when we are done. I know it can be . . . difficult—”

Newt waves her off, waves off her concern. “No. No, it’s fine. I’m fine.” Fuck. What happened to the days when it was just him and Hermann and an empty lab? When Newt could have his freak-outs on the storeroom floor in peace. He doesn’t even really get them any more, not like he used to—completely different brain chemistry and all that—but . . . but he’s starting to think maybe this is the time to pick things back up.

In his time, he’s cut up every single kaiju that ever made it to Earth. Before that, back in school, he’d even had a few whacks at human cadavers. But the kaiju had, mostly, been just dismembered parts, no more grotesque than a side of steak, and the cadavers had been donations; people who’d died from natural causes or terminal illness, people who’d wanted to do one last good deed after their deaths, training the next generation of doctors and scientists. Not unwilling casualties of an inter-dimensional war.

The kaijin in front of them was grown beneath the flesh of one Lisa Ngai, twenty-eight, teacher. She’d been visiting family at the time of the outbreak, had stopped coming in to work two weeks ago. Her worried fiancée, Philipe (twenty-six, shoe company startup operator), had taken her to their primary care physician. She’d been scheduled to get a blood test next week. When she’d finally turned, in a restaurant two blocks from Nathan Road, Philipe had been her first victim.

“Doc? You good for us to start?” From Joel, Armah’s assistant, and Newt nods. He doesn’t even do the cutting any more; he has _people_ for that, now.

Ngai has been stripped and laid out in pieces on the cold metal examining table. By the time the Rangers had caught up to her, word of the appropriate kill method has spread, and she’d been sliced clean in half at the pelvis by a hail of projectiles from an EM-13b automatic railgun. The area between her navel and thigh is one mangled mess of pulverized blue flesh and shattered bone, seeping and rotting and raw. There’s a good six-inch gap they’ll never be able to fill, splattered as it is all over Nelson Street.

“Beginning removal of the human dermis,” Armah states, and she and Joel get to work in neat, precise scalpel-cuts. Half their job is already done for them; Ngai’s face is gone, as is the skin on her arms. She has one ring of skin around her left thigh and her right shin is covered from ankle to knee, like some kind of grotesque garterbelt-slash-legwarmer combo. Everything beneath is the harsh navy-charcoal of the kaiiju, sleek and firm and more like a carapace than Newt’s own pebbled scutes.

“Structure of the dermis appears consistent with human skin,” Armah is saying, “though we’d need to run further tests to be sure.”

“How was it being kept alive?” Newt signs, peering closer to where Joel is carefully peeling away Ngai’s chest. This close, the smell is . . . distinctive.

Armah smells it too: “Formaldehyde?”

“Or something like it. There are no capillaries connecting the . . . skinsuit to the body underneath. It should have rotted out weeks ago.” Newt’s certainly did.

“We’ll check with the families,” Joel adds. “See if they, like. Noticed anything. Smell, texture.”

Newt nods, leans back as Joel finishes removing the whole front section. He places it carefully on a side table, epidermis down, like a gruesome red-pink tablecloth, bulging at one end with two neat, fatty lumps. Which:

“Skinsuit still had tits.”

Crude, but . . .

But his (ahem) baby fat was the first thing Newt had shed, k-virus burning it through to turn into alien muscle and sinew. It’s one of the most common early symptoms of the virus, along with fever. There’s even a substantial black market in (thankful fake) diet supplements based around it, and Newt knows Hannibal would kill to get his hands on some kind of marketably safe-ish version of the real thing.

Armah is giving Newt something of a Hermann Eyebrow above her PPE, so he adds: “Retention of subcutaneous fat is new. See if we have anyone bigger, I want to know size and weigh differences between the— the pre- and post-transformation bodies, with and without the skinsuit.” Newt had been short and stocky, before, and not exactly svelte after too many years of stress and no sleep and terrible eating habits. If Newt hadn’t found a way to halt Hermann’s degeneration, would he have ended up whipcord thin and still a head taller, even as a kaiju? More of a Karloff than a Scunner. Speaking of: “And injuries. Scars, missing limbs, skeletal anomalies, anything; I want to know if it carries through.”

Armah nods, and makes a note.

“Hey, docs? Check this out.”

Joel is examining the underside of Ngai’s skin; her breast tissue, in fact. The fat is parted with a delicately held tenaculum, and they come over to see what he’s found.

Armah inhales, sharply. “Is that—”

“Cancer,” Joel confirms.

They stare at it; one little misshapen clump of cells, no bigger than the stud of an earring. And Newt thinks of it and of all the things he can’t say, even now, and he thinks: _Maybe . . ._

* * *

Four weeks later, they’ve got more than maybe.

“Cancer,” the Marshall says, once Newt has given his update. “These people . . . turned, because they had cancer?”

“Not the cancer per se,” Newt signs. “We’ve only found actual cancerous cells in, like, four of the subjects. Keeping in mind we only had the skin to work with. But they all had a genetic marker, mutations in either BRCA1 or 2.” He’s pacing, hands everywhere; is lucky the space in front of the Marshal’s desk is big enough to allow it.

“And for those of us who barely finished high school?” Which, total lie. Newt happens to know Herc has a Masters in International Relations. But:

“Tumor suppressants. Everyone who stabilized had a genetic mutation that made it more likely they’d _get_ cancer, even if they hadn’t developed it yet.”

“And the people who didn’t?” See? Barely finished high school Newt’s scaly ass.

“Right, right. We’re going through those data now. I mean . . . it’s not always easy to get samples, y’know?” They need something human enough to extract DNA from, for one thing. “We’re having family members send in, like, hairbrushes and stuff. Getting swabs from parents and kids, all that shit. We’re narrowing it down. It’s . . . it’s not a one-to-one correlation, nothing like ‘oh you have Q934X, you’re fucked’ or whatever. But it’s definitely a factor. Probably. Very likely.”

“‘Definitely probably very likely’?”

Newt winces. Stop pacing. “I—” He glances up. Cameras, right. _Always assume you are being watched_. Fuck. “Based on some, uh. Theories. About, y’know. Myself. I think it fits.” About the way Newt saved himself, saved Hermann. About the treatments they’ve long known and kept secret, even now.

Hansen’s hand clenches against his desk, just slightly. “Right,” he says. “And this leaves us where, exactly?”

Newt shrugs. “Other than advancing the general knowledge of science on behalf of all humanity? Uh . . . tell people with family histories of cancer to get fucking vaccinated?”

“You know that’s not what they’ll ask us.”

Newt huffs, start pacing again. “It’s not a cure. Or a treatment. Or a magical fucking wish genie.”

“But?”

“But . . .” Newt stops, looks out behind the Marshal, through the windows and over what he can see of the city, through the slicing rain. “But, yeah,” he admits. “It could be the start of one.”

* * *

February’s outbreak was in El Triunfo, and technically has no casualties. Mostly because they get reports the Honduran government rounds up any unvaccinated individuals they can find and . . . removes them, further details unspecified. They’ve been getting more and more stories like that; of countries introducing “vaccination passports”, of restricting the rights and movement of anyone without one. And, on the one hand, Newt very definitely does not want any more people dying because they’re _still_ being idiots over his goddamn vaccine; the one that’s, like, totally, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent safe and like ninety-six percent effective and one hundred percent less fatal than actually _catching_ the goddamn k-virus and that, oh yeah, Newt literally gave up his _species_ to create. And, on the other hand: yikes no.

But that’s why Newt does research science, not public health policy, and as it happens he’s elbow deep in the former when things get, once again, fucking worse. Because welcome to twenty-fucking-thirty-three. Welcome to the last twenty years, period.

There’re in a group, loitering in refurbished lobby at K2. Hannibal moved his 19th century opium den triad hideout across the city after they went public, leaving behind an obnoxiously normal glass-and-chrome commercial research institute, right smack-bang in the middle of the Boneslum. They’ve been using the facilities for the autopsies and most of the lab work, ostensibly to save the PPDC the cost of upgrading its own decades-old equipment. It’s early afternoon, and they’re there to walk Doctor Ng to the door; she’s headed back to the ‘Dome with a case of samples. Newt is here mostly to avoid a concall with the Secretary-General—something about which Hermann currently has his panties in a massive twist, not to mention the Marshal—but, well. He’s _working_ , damnit. He’s done like a thousand press conferences and concalls and private briefings over the last month and he’s tired and snappy and when Newt gets tired and snappy people tend to bring out guns, and he _just doesn’t feel like fucking dealing with it today, okay dude, so fucking sue me. Jesus. Just let me save the fucking planet in peace for like ten seconds. Anything they want to ask me they can ask you and yeah yeah I’ll owe you and suck your dick and do the next one, whatever. Fuck._

So.

They wave goodbye to Doctor Ng and her two enormous, terrifying bodyguards, and the humans are halfway through discussing how they are totally going to send someone out for cake, they’ve all earned the sugar, when Newt hears the gunshots. And the scream.

And the thing is? The Boneslum has a bad rap, sure, but it’s not actually _dangerous_. This is Hong Kong; pretty much nowhere is _dangerous_. Light muggings at worst. Also, they’re here saving the world. And are funded by the mob. Honestly, no one in the city is suicidal or nihilistic enough to mess with them.

No, their enemies come from a little bit further afield.

Newt is bursting out the front doors even as the rest of his team is still processing what’s going on. K2 Tower opens onto a narrow side-street, wedged between a probably illegal apartment building and what’s left of one of Reckoner’s enormous ribs and the first thing that Newt sees, in the shadow of the latter, are two bodies.

Hannibal’s people. Blood oozing from their half-missing heads.

The second thing he sees is half a dozen walking steroids in black tacticool, trying to manhandle Doctor Ng into the back of a van.

_“Oh I don’t fucking_ think _so.”_

Newt knows these assholes. Oh yeah he does. They have History.

The meatheads see him, too, and one barks, “Fuck! It was supposed to be back at the Shatterdome!” and Newt has one moment to send a bleakly victorious, _“Ha! See!”_ to Hermann before he lunges.

He isn’t . . . actually sure what he intends to do beyond that—usually just roaring at people is enough, all teeth and claws and atavistic terror—and ends up with a face-full of lab coat as the men throw Doctor Ng right at him. Which, okay cool.

He catches her and helps her to her feet, is halfway through asking if she’s okay when she says: “They took it! They took the samples!” And Newt thinks:

_“Oh. Shit.”_

The samples. Comparing his blood to the blood of the other stabilized kaijin. The super-duper ultra top secret squirrel do not copy samples they’ve been using to try and isolate and replicate a universal stabilization factor. Not a cure, but the first step. Or the last, if your goal was to create a kaijin army.

_(Across the city, Hermann sighs, and stands. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he tells the Marshal and the Secretary-General and no less than twelve heads of state. “There is . . . an incident I must attend to.”_

_And Herc Hansen raises one eyebrow and says: “What the fuck has he gotten himself into this time? And couldn’t it bloody wait?”)_

The van’s tires scream as it tears off down the street, and Newt isn’t far behind. He can outrun a van. He’s pretty sure. He almost grabs it, too, when it takes a sharp right on Carpenter Road, but for the second car that slams into his side.

The impact sends Newt stumbling, but the car has it worse; the entire front crumpled and airbags popped. Cursing, Newt is checking on the driver—fine, terrified, but fine—when practically the entirety of K2 arrives on the scene, telling him to, “Go! Go go!” as they take charge of one very bemused businessman who finds himself, quite suddenly, being given first aid by, literally, the world’s best doctors.

Newt goes. Asshole Van has a proper lead now but it’s easy enough to follow by the trail of car accidents and panicked people it’s leaving in its wake. People who do not, it must be said, grow any less panicked when their already-totaled cars get even more destroyed as they’re used as a springboard by a sprinting kaiju.

The van turns right on Junction Road, heading north. Trying to get up to the border, maybe. Or to lose Newt in the suburbs or the forests.

He stops another accident at the intersection with Inverness, catching a minivan careening out of control before it can slam into a car waiting at the lights. The car’s driver, a young woman, blinks at him in shock through the windscreen before he’s on the move again, taking a standing leap over a double-decker bus that’s come to a lurching stop diagonally across the road. It’s a residential area, it’s the afternoon, and the streets are full of cars and people, going about their ordinary business and, now, peering out of balcony windows to see about the fuss.

And, yeah. Even with the obstacles and the distractions? Newt is catching up. He can run maybe one-fifty, two hundred Ks if he pushes it, and he doesn’t get physically tired. The van can almost certainly go faster, but it has to slow down to weave through the traffic, even if its driver is a fucking maniac.

It’s maybe a hundred meters ahead, just passing Lok Fu, when the back doors burst open. There’s a dude, kneeling just beyond them, something mounted on his shoulder. Something that makes one of the loudest booms Newt has ever heard outside a daikaiju fight and _holy shit it’s a rocket launcher_.

An Mk 153 SMAW, in fact, which Newt knows because Hermann knows, because Hermann is watching through Newt’s eyes, and because Hermann is watching through Newt’s eyes—and because Hermann is a huge fucking nerd who can calculate trajectories in his sleep—Newt know the shot goes wide. It won’t hit Newt. But the people waiting outside the mall just behind him? The ones gathered in an excited clump with cellphones?

Yeah. They’re fucked.

And it’s a heartbeat, an eye blink, and Newt thinks:

_Well. If they worked, we’d use them._

And across the city, Hermann screams, and Newt is definitely going to be sleeping on the couch forever because he jumps, big hand extended, and grabs the fucking rocket right out of the fucking air like a goddamn sportsball legend. He drops, and rolls, and tries to tuck himself around it right as it explodes and, fuck. Okay. It’s like . . . like falling from the top of the goddamn ICC. It knocks the breath right out of him, knocks the _thought_ right out of him, and the sound and the shockwaves feel like getting kicked right in the goddamn Johnston's. His head is ringing and his gut and his arms and his _tail_ all ache and he can’t hear for shit, but when he stumbles to his feet—in the middle of a goddamn crater in the asphalt, no less—nothing irreplaceable falls out or off.

_(“Doc? Doc, you okay? Doctor!”_

_“He caught it,” Hermann manages to gasp. His gut is cramping too hard to stand and the only reason he hasn’t thrown up is he can’t get enough air into his lungs to do so. But: “He bloody_ caught _it.”)_

So. Okay. That happened.

Newt drops the exploded shell, and roars because fucking _yeah_! He got _shot_ with a _rocket_ and _survived_ and _fuck you assholes fuck the fucking you_ and holy shit they’re getting away. And he’s off again.

And it’s like . . . maybe the rocket did knock something loose, because he’s starting to feel a bit . . . weird. There’s just him and the road and the distance to the van, careening wildly up ahead. And his eyesight is good enough, now, to know the men in the van are panicked. They expected the rocket to get him. They’re scared that it didn’t. Last time they had to nail him to the floor with harpoons and run twenty thousand volts through him until he passed out. But they can’t do that from a moving van. All they can do is _run_ , run and be chased; Newt’s claws tearing chunks out of the asphalt, a growl rumbling in the back of his throat. Because he will run, and he will catch them, because that is the Order and that is what he will do, and there is nothing beyond or outside. No pain, no thought, no fatigue. Just the Order. Just the feel of the van’s bumper as he grabs it, crushed in his jaws, and the terrorized screaming of the meat within.

He bites down, hard, teeth piercing rubber and fabric and steel, claws curving downwards to try and anchor himself in the ground. The road tears beneath his feet and the van’s still-open back doors swing wildly, beating into his shoulders, but it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Nor are the bullets that bounce off his hide from the frantic gunshots, nor the electricity that arcs from the prod; not nearly enough to break skin, to damage flesh.

“Fuck! Fuck! Get it off! Get it _off_!”

“Jesus fuck it was supposed— it wasn’t supposed to be here! We don’t _have_ anything!”

The air fills with the reek of burning rubber as the van’s tires strip themselves bald, as its engine strains against Newt’s weight and his strength and his grip. Something has to give, eventually, and it isn’t going to be Newt. He shifts the grip of his jaws, biting forward, until he feels something hot and round beneath his tongue. Then he pulls his head back, tearing, until there’s a scream of tortured metal and the whole back axle of the van rips free and drops away, bitten clean in half.

The recoil sends him rolling backward, too, bouncing inelegantly along the road, but he rights himself with a roar and lurches to his feet. The van has continued moving from inertia, but with the rear wheels gone it’s come to a screeching stop and Newt stalks towards it now, slow and angry, watching as the meat inside screams and falls over itself and struggles to get away.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck it’s going to kill us oh fuck—”

And then:

“Shut the fuck up you fucking useless pussies. _I’ll_ handle this.” And a piece of meat stalks forward.

It is big, for meat. Cracking its knuckles and grinning and . . . familiar. Newt knows this meat. It was _there_ , in the warehouse. One of the ones that violated the Hive.

Newt roars at it, outraged, and the other meat cowers and covers its ears in fear. Not the big meat. The big meat holds out its arms and gestures towards itself with its fingers. “C’mon then,” it says. “You know me, don’t you? Yeah. I put your freak ass down once and I’ll do it again. Easier this time, too. ‘Cause you? You won’t do _shit_. Can play big make-believe with your mewling but we all know you’re just a scared pissant little faggot. And you ain’t got shit.”

He lunges, fist pulled back and Newt doesn’t bother to avoid it. What can _meat_ do to the Hive? So he snarls and the first connects with his snout and—

And Newt stumbles back.

The shock must show on his face because Big Meat laughs, rolls his shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “Not so fucking tough now, huh?” And attacks again.

His attacks . . . Newt _feels_ them. He doesn’t know how but he does. Big Meat is strong, too strong, and fast. And small.

And Newt has fought Mako and fought the other Rangers and knows what it is to fight meat. They are small, and fast, and tricky, and sometimes they trip him or hit him in places that would injure or disable, had they had weapons. But they don’t hurt, not really. Big Meat hurts. It has a blade, too, sharp enough to cut Newt’s hide and Newt does not panic, because Newt has trained for this, because Mako has trained him. They knew it would happen. And so Newt blocks, and weaves, and the air is filled with the acrid blue reek of blood as Big Meat’s knife carves into the thick scutes of his arms and shoulders, over and over and . . .

“Come _on_!” Big Meat screams. “Fucking _fight_ me!”

And something is not right. Big Meat is sweating and close and meat has such a smell to it, wet and carbon, and Big Meat smells like that but smells like something _else_ too, something acid and blue. But when Newt tries to push forward with the Hive there is _nothing_. Not even the awful voidstatic hum of the Others, just nothing; hollow and dead.

He barks, disgusted at the perversion, and maybe Big Meat thinks it is fear (maybe it is, just a little) because it laughs a horrible, empty laugh and darts forward to strike and—

And there is movement; a _paff_ and a _tsstch_ , and the tips of a taser bury themselves into Big Meat’s neck. Its eyes go very wide, then it begins to convulse as the taser clicks and pumps current through Big Meat’s body.

Big Meat drops, and a dozen more humans swarm on top of it. Neat blue and navy, and Newt blinks and takes a step back and finally, _finally_ the outside world rushes in.

They’re surrounded, cars on every side, a sea of flashing blue and red. One of the new humans rushes up to Newt’s side and says: “Doctor Geiszler? Doctor Geiszler are you okay? I know HKSL, I can understand you.”

_(And somewhere, not actually all that far away, Hermann mutters: “Come back, Newton. It’s okay. Everything is okay.”)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It occurred to me when I was writing this I wasn't exactly sure where the Boneslum was supposed to be. So I've put it in the place Westerners always put things when they set stuff in "Hong Kong", i.e. at the site of the former Kowloon Walled City. The Walled City was a tenement housing block that basically looked like what you think Hong Kong looks like if you've never actually been there, and was the template look for every "near-future dystopian Asian city" in media (the film's Boneslum included). It got torn down in the 90s, and is currently a memorial park.
> 
> _And it's creeping it's way through my windows_  
>  _And it's slithering under my door_  
>  _And it's in my peripheral vision_  
>  _And it's burrowing up under my floor_  
>  _And it's whispering into my eardrums_  
>  _And it's[telling me that I want more](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKcmZGhUrQ)._


	3. “We are the fucking good guys.”

And then? Then Newt wakes up.

_“Fuck! Oh fuck what—?”_

“Welcome back.”

Cool hands on his face, cool thoughts up against his own.

_“Hermann. What—?”_

Except it’s not an honest question. Newt knows _exactly_ where he is an how he got here. Knows how Hermann got here, jumping from the back of an HKPF car, driven direct from the ‘Dome.

Oh. Fuck.

Newt _passed out_. Or, rather . . . human!Newt passed out. Human!Newt, the chemicals and electrical pulses of the primary brain, overloaded and blanked into unconsciousness and kaiju!Newt, the secondary brain’s backup system, had been left to compensate.

A mindless, raging monster. No better than the kaijin they’d put down on Nathan Road. He could’ve _hurt_ someone, he could’ve—

“Done nothing of the sort, don’t be ludicrous.”

Newt pulls back from where he’d apparently been nuzzling into Hermann’s chest. In the middle of the street. In broad daylight. _“What—?”_

“You are quite affectionate, I’ll give you that. And tremendously single-minded.” And, god. Hermann wants to slap him for the thing with the rocket launcher, Newt can feel that he does. And he’s still pissed about the teleconference. But, mostly? Mostly he’s just amused.

_“How can you . . . how—?”_

“Newton,” Hermann says, drawing himself up to his stuffiest, most down-the-glasses-esque disdainful librarian stare. “I, of all people, know what you feel like when you are . . . not yourself. That? Was not . . . that.”

 _“Dude I_ passed out _.”_ Passed out, but still moving.

“And still thinking, or as close as you ever get to it.”

_“Har fucking har. Fuck you, dude, I could’ve—”_

“And I’m telling you that you didn’t. Despite ample opportunity.”

And the shit of it? The shit of it is Hermann is _right_. Newt hadn’t. Hadn’t hurt anyone. Even when . . . fuck. The dude Newt’s monster brain had been thinking of as “big meat” had attacked him, Newt had still fought on the defensive. Still hadn’t wanted to hurt the asshole. Just like he’d still known who Mako was, and still remembered what she’d taught him, and hadn’t touched the cops when they’d shown up, just sat patient and quiet and waited for Hermann. Exactly what he would’ve done anyway, probably. Just . . . simpler. Clearer.

 _“I . . . Fuck, Herms, this is . . . This is too much.”_ Just when he thought he was . . . okay. When he’d had some kind of handle on his whole, like. Deal. But har har, nope. Because fuck the universe, basically. And fuck Newton fucking Geiszler.

And Hermann just . . . pats him. On the chest, awkward and totally, one hundred percent fucking Hermann. “No doubt,” he says, which. Thanks, dude.

_“Oh fuck. Oh fuck this means . . . If it works like that, it means—”_

“The human brain is endlessly complicated,” Hermann says, before Newt can discover, once and for all, whether or not kaiju can hyperventilate from panic. “And we only have one. I _know_ you know that, and I know you know there’s no reason for your own brains to be any simpler. Do not draw hasty conclusions merely because they feed your martyr’s guilt complex.”

_“Jesus, fu—”_

“‘Fuck me, dude,’ yes yes I’m well aware.”

And Newt . . . has nothing to say to that. Nothing to say to Hermann’s snooty fucking stare and the flaming laser sword of his scientific certainty.

 _“Fuck,”_ he says instead, body slumping onto all fours. Kaiju don’t get tired, not really, and yet still he feels somehow fucking _wrecked_.

“I’m sure they’ll send us home soon,” Hermann says, close and soothing in both mind and body. Fuck but Newt doesn’t deserve him. For all that he’s a stubborn, arrogant, standoffish asshole, in any sane universe he would be miles, light years, from Newt’s league.

“Regardless,” Hermann continues, shifting on his feet and absolutely totally trying to shrug off a blush, “we got them. _You_ got them.”

Because, yeah. All around them the HKPF is cuffing tac-vested assholes and loading them into their own vans. Kidnapping, murder, treason, dangerous driving, attempted theft of classified materials, firing a freaking _rocket launcher_ into a civilian shopping mall . . . Newt isn’t naive enough to believe anything they’ve got will stick, exactly, but . . .

But. They’re closer. Closer than they’ve ever been before.

And then there’s the big meat.

“John Stone,” Hermann says, abruptly.

_“What?”_

“The man you’ve been thinking of as, ah, ‘Big Meat.’ He was on the yacht with Chau and Ms. Lee; they both recognized him from cellphone footage.”

Right. Right, because _of course_ his little episode into mindless monster mayhem was filmed and broadcast and _of course_ all his freaking staff saw it. Fuck.

“Newton, I would not worry about—” is as far as Hermann gets, because one the HKPF—the one from before, who’d told Newt he could sign—jogs up. He’s holding an evidence bag and presents it to them with a:

“Doctors? Doctors, I think . . . I think you need to look at this.”

It’s a jet injector. Newt takes the bag as it’s offered and turns it over in his hands which, okay. Work. He can do work. Freak out later. Work now.

“It was in the van,” Officer Eager explains.

“It’s not ours,” Newt signs, carefully. They’ve already been handed back their sample case, currently sitting at Hermann’s feet. One crisis averted, another started. Story of their lives. Also: “Can I open this? I just need to . . . check something. I won’t touch it.” Not that he’s even organic enough to tamper with evidence in the first place; his skin is closer in composition to the cops’ gloves than their hands.

“Um . . . I guess?” Officer Eager’s obviously not enthused about it but, on the other hand, they _are_ world-renowned celebrity hero scientists and, also, Newt is a fifteen foot monster who just took an RPG to the gut and bit the axel out of a moving vehicle (which, also: gross, his mouth). Who the fuck’s gonna stop him?

So Newt peels open the ziplock bag and the stench hits him straight away, familiar and rotten.

“Newton?”

“Where’s— uh. Where’s Stone? The guy I was fighting?” Newt asks the cop.

“Um . . .”

“Kid, I am _not_ fucking around.” He holds up the baggie in a big claw. “ _This_ is k-virus, or close enough. Stone reeked of it. We need this whole area quarantined off, I need to know everyone who’s come into contact with that asshole and their vax schedule, and we need to get him into iso. _Now_. At the ‘Dome.”

“I-I don’t think we can—”

“I’ll contact the Marshal,” Hermann says, because Hermann is a genius and steamrolling with red tape is basically his second doctorate. “He can contact the Secretary for Security and they can sort the logistics, though I believe you find the city’s arrangement with the PPDC is quite clear; the clean-up of extraterrestrial materials falls under _our_ jurisdiction.

“Um,” says the cop, who’s all of twenty-nothing and has obviously determined fighting with war heroes (and a kaiju) is definitely, definitely above his pay grade. “R-right. Um. Come with me, then?”

 _“Attaboy,”_ Newt says, as Hermann makes his call.

* * *

“You know I was supposed to be retiring next year. Fifty-four, nine months; ’s what all the old bastards back at Duntroon would tell us.”

Later, back at the ‘Dome. They got Stone, mostly because the Hongkongers didn’t want him and it was easier to let the PPDC get caught in the middle of the inevitable international shitfight. He’s been stripped to a set of PPDC-issue sweats and is currently holed up in a glass-fronted isolation room. The same one, in fact, Newt spent a good three weeks working from before his condition had gotten . . . too dire.

“I’m supposed to be on a beach drinking Mai Tais with Hermann and Vans,” Newt counters, earning a dark huff from the Marshal for his efforts.

The glass is one way, meaning they can see Stone, but he can’t see them. He’s there with Hansen, field kit in his big hands, Hermann on standby next door.

“You ready to do this?” Hansen asks him.

“Nope.” Newt answers. Honestly, if he’d never had to walk inside this room again he would’ve died happy. This room is not the Good Place.

Hansen just slaps his shoulder, comfortingly manful, and Newt sighs. Fuck his life, basically.

“All right. Let’s do this thing.”

Hansen nods, and makes a gesture to the camera watching them from above. A door to Newt’s left hisses open. It’s supposedly an airlock but it’s designed for humans and Newt’s too big, so they’ve had to open both at once. He’s pretty sure that, whatever Stone’s done to himself, it’s not airborne and that Stone won’t try and jump him again. (Newt is, like, one giant bruise from the rocket and like ten thousand papercuts from Stone’s shitty little knife—sharp enough to cut skin, not long enough to get to anything important—and right now probably even a normal human punch would smart. Also, he just hates getting punched on principle. This is, he knows, information people find surprising about him but _seriously_. Punk rock or not he’s an _academic_ , not a cage fighter.)

Newt might feel like shit but Stone doesn’t look much better, in a way that’s not just the terrible lighting; he’s sweating and pale, and though he’s doing a good job of trying to sit upright and stoic on the room’s bed-slash-bench, there’s a faint tremble in his over-muscled arms he can’t quite hide.

When Newt enters, Stone’s eyes flick towards him, briefly, before settling back onto the glass in front of him. He’s definitely got a fever, which Newt can now tell because, conveniently, half the things on his nose people think are nostrils are actually pit organs, meaning he can “see” thermal radiation. And Stone’s practically blinding.

The glass wall behind Newt flicks to life, materializing into a holo of Hermann. That, Stone apparently isn’t expecting, and he startles, just slightly.

“Mister Stone,” Hermann says, voice’s prissy officiousness dialed up to eleven. “I am here to inform you you are being detained by the Pan Pacific Defense Corps under the International Treaty for the Handling and Disposal of Extraterrestrial Biohazardous Material. This is a public health and safety issue and you do not have the right to a lawyer nor the right to appeal. I am also informing you on behalf of the Hong Kong Security Bureau that you are under criminal investigation; this process will be handled separately and you will be allowed legal representation, though you will not be freed from detention while you remain a public health risk. Do you understand?”

Hermann pauses, and Stone, completely unsurprisingly, makes no response. So Hermann just keeps pausing, and Stone keeps not responding, and the silence draws awkwardly on until Newt huffs in irritation—seriously, no matter what a badass Stone might think he is, there’s no way he’s going to out-stubborn Hermann freaking Gottlieb—and starts unpacking his kit on the room’s lone table.

Stone’s eyes flick to it, perhaps because he can’t tell what bits are _Newt’s_ eyes and doesn’t realize Newt is still watching him, and the bright heat-glow around him creeps up another notch. Particularly when Newt starts pulling out needles.

And because Newt knows, Hermann knows, and says:

“Mr. Stone. I asked you a question. Do you understand the circumstances of your detention?”

Stone nods, just a fraction.

“Please state your understanding vocally, Mr. Stone, or you will be declared a noncompliant patient.”

“Fuck you! Yes, all right. I fucking get it.”

“Excellent,” says Hermann, insufferably bland. “I am also informing you that all interactions you have while in the PPDC’s custody are being recorded and monitored by independent investigators to ensure you are being treated humanely and in accordance with all appropriate international requirements regarding medical custody and prisoners of war.” A twitch, just a tiny one, at the term. “Should you choose to formally identify yourself and your country of citizenship, representatives from said nation or nations will be sourced immediately.”

They’re pretty much taking it as given “John Stone” isn’t this asshole’s actual name, and neither he nor any of the flunkies currently cooling their heels in regular detention had any ID. Hansen thinks there’s an outside possibility some country or other is going to shuffle forward meekly to claim him, particularly if he’s either IC or a merc or both, but Newt wouldn’t be putting money on it. They guy’s not just a war criminal and a bioterrorist, but he’s one that was stupid enough to get caught. In broad daylight. He’s burnt, and he knows it.

Hermann is saying:

“I believe you already know Doctor Newton Geiszler. Doctor Geiszler is a trained medical professional and the world’s foremost expert in exopathogens. He will be in charge of your medical care. For the remainder of this session I will serve as his translator so you may communicate. Note that, while aspects of medical privacy will be preserved wherever possible, Doctor Geiszler and the PPDC may be required by law to disclose information gained during your treatment. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want that fucking thing touching me,” Stone says which, ouch dude. _Hurtful_.

“Noted and denied. You currently pose an unknown risk to human medical personnel. Doctor Geiszler has the advantage of not only being the most qualified individual in the world to lead your treatment, but is also unaffected by any potential bioweapons you may be carrying.” Probably. They think. (Newt really fucking hopes because, hey. It’s not like they make PPE in his size.)

“If that is all, I believe we may begin. Doctor Geiszler?”

Newt gives a thumbs up to the camera, and the video screen flicks off. When Hermann’s voice next comes, still broadcast over the room’s speakers, it’s all Newt.

“Okay, so like, wow. Guess we’ve never actually been introduced, huh? Call me Newt, and yeah. I’m gonna be looking after you so, like. Lucky you, right?”

“I’m not sick,” Stone growls, practically spitting it at the wall. He hadn’t startled at Newt-in-Hermann’s voice, either. Which . . . hm.

“Right. Right, so like. Lemme guess? Your bosses, whomever they are—no no, don’t tell me, I’m just the nerd squad I don’t give a shit, save it for the cops—they’ve been telling you they’ve been giving you, I dunno. Steroids? Superserum? Some kinda experimental new treatment, right? Anti-kaijin weapon. For quite a while, too, judging from the track marks in your arm.” Newt gestures to the limb in question, inner elbow streaked with yellow-purple bruising, and Stone tucks it against his chest almost self-consciously.

“I’m guessing that, like, first up you started getting real hungry. Like, ravenous, all the time, right? Just eating and eating except the fat just melts off your body; that little bit of middle-age chub just . . . poof! Gone. Like you’re fucking twenty and invincible all over again. Then the muscle starts packing in. I mean, we can all see those guns you’re sporting there, champ. Des and Troy, pew pew. And _ouch_. Don’t get me wrong I have trained with like every single Ranger on this base and half the ones on every other. I’m way used to getting wailed on by humans and, like, a lot of ‘em? Yeah they’ve had family and shit killed by kaiju and even if they think they’re not they kinda take it out on me. Which, y’know. Fine, whatever. They can smack me around, it’s for a good cause and it’s only my little feelings getting bruised. But you? Ouff.”

Newt’s pacing, both sets of arms gesturing wildly and Stone is watching now, fascinated in spite of himself. Most people are, when Newt gets on a roll. Rockstar, freak show . . . always on stage, always performing. So second nature it’s close enough to a first.

“But I bet you’re not feeling real great right now, right?” Newt picks something off the table and shows it to Stone. “Temperature gun, do you mind?” Then, before he can answer, points it at Stone’s head and waits for the beep. “Thirty-eight point nine.” He shows the reading to Stone before putting the device back on the table. “Not too bad, but still a fever. Bet your muscles are starting to feel a bit funky, too. Like a bad case of the DOMS. That’ll be the silicon fibers starting to tear through the old meat. What was in the injector, by the way? Did they tell you?”

Newt waits for an answer, but Stone just thins his lips and looks away.

“I’ve had my peeps have a look at the residue and, let me tell you, whatever was in that was hella funky. Never seen anything quite like it; got half a team running it through mass spec and the others trying to get some kind of KNA sequence as we speak. But I guess we wouldn’t know exactly what it was because, like, K-Sci? We’ve only ever tried to _cure_ k-virus. Not weaponize it.”

Stone’s fists clench, just a fraction.

“Because, yeah. Other thing: Humans, right? They have this real distinctive stank. Like, it’s not _bad_ , exactly. You get used to it. But it _is_ distinctive. Wet carbon kinda smell, weirdly inorganic. But kaiju? They smell like people. Living things, y’know? And things _made_ from kaju parts? Ouff, well. I’m sure you know what dead bodies smell like. Rotting blood, all that shit. Ditto k-virus. You wouldn’t think you couldn’t smell a virus but the world is crazy, right? And a human _with_ k-virus? Yeah, worst of both worlds. Can smell those poor sonsofbitches across a room.”

“I’m not sick,” Stone repeats.

“That what they told you?” Newt stop pacing, waiting. Stone still won’t meet his eyes.

“Right, so. Normal life expectancy for a k-virus victim is like . . . six weeks from infection? Eight if you’re unlucky. But you, those track marks . . . they’ve been pumping this into you longer than that, haven’t that? Found some way to slow the progression. Definitely possible in theory; we worked on the same for a while but the problem was it made the failure cascade at the tail end like a zillion times worse. So like yeah you get maybe a month or two more life but the bit where your body starts eating itself to turn you into glass and toilet cleaner also lasts twice as long and sucks twice as hard. And then you’ve got that injector . . . working hypothesis is that it was an accelerant of some kind. Nasty. So maybe you’re back on the regular track now, maybe it’s faster. Or slower. Or just fucked the hell up. Would need to take some blood to make sure. You gonna let me take some blood, champ?” Then: “Wait, that sounds like a threat. I mean, y’know. Medically. Got a nice sterile vacutainer here and all.” He gestures to where the objects in question are laid out on the table, as obvious and innocuous as anything medical ever is. “And,” he adds. “Hey, if you’re _really_ not sick? I can prove that to you right now. Straight up. Sample of your blood, a scootch of mine for show and tell . . . Infection’s real obvious when you see it under a microscope and I can do it right here in front of you, no tricks, nothing up my sleeves.” He makes jazz hands to demonstrate.

“I . . .” Stone starts, then stops, and Newt knows they’ve got him.

“Your buddies are fine, by the way,” he adds. “They were pretty freaked out when we told them they might’ve been exposed. K-virus isn’t that transmissible human-to-human once it’s in a body but with this mad science shit who the hell knows, right? But we ran swabs and everyone is a-okay.”

“What . . . what’s gonna happen to them?”

Newt huffs. “Hoo boy way outta my wheelies, champ. I mean there’s the whole murder and kidnapping and firing heavy ordinance into crowds— You’re welcome, by the way, ‘cause like if people had _actually_ died you’d be so fucked right now. HK’s pretty pissed as it is. I’m sure they’ll send in some hardasses tomorrow to hassle you about it. I mean, real talk time but you’re probably lucky we’ve got you. Lotta people out there are _real_ keen to let you know exactly how unhappy they are with your bosses.”

Stone scoffs. “So, what? You’re just gonna threaten me with a slow death instead? Hold out your cure while I rot away in this cell, until I get so desperate I’ll tell you whatever you want to fucking hear?”

And Newt says: “There’s no cure for the k-virus.”

And Stone replies: “Don’t fucking try that with me you mutant piece of shit. We know you have one. _You_ wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

_(A room away, Hansen mutters: “Shit. Newt . . .”)_

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this,” Newt says. “I know it can be hard to tell. But I am not, in fact, cured.”

“Right. The world fucking expert just happens to _mysteriously_ survive while millions die. Go fuck yourself. _Doctor_.”

_(“Back the fuck down, Newt. He’s baiting you.” Not loud enough for the mic to pick up, but loud enough for Hermann to hear. For Newt to hear, where a part of him is nestled in Hermann’s mind.)_

Newt stands, full height, head against the ceiling. Takes a deep breath, clenches and unclenches his claws.

“That,” he finally says, “is what that keeps _me_ up at night. As for _you_ . . . I need you to understand something. I don’t give a shit if you like me but I am your doctor. I’m here to give you the very best medical care in the whole damn world, and I will do it, whether you like it or not. No ifs, or buts, or conditions. I don’t give a shit what you tell the HKPF, or the PPDC, or the _New York_ fucking _Times_. I. Will. Help you. Because that’s what we do, here. We help people. We save the world. Because we? _We_ are the fucking good guys. You get it?”

And Stone looks away, jaw working and fists clenching. And then finally, _finally_ he holds out his arm and says: “Take your fucking blood.” And Newt does.

* * *

He starts work on a Phase II stabilization that night. Because, like he said; they’re the fucking good guys.

Right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is a formulation by mathematician Mike Alder that states, "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating." It's a counter to theoretical paradoxes like the immovable-object-versus-unstoppable-force which, presumably, could be solved by simply obtaining two such objects and empirically testing them to see which one was was, in fact, incorrectly named.
> 
>  _Now I can talk, no one gets off_  
>  _(I[know how you like to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJDCMth8poM).)_


	4. “Strong recommend, by the way; great feeling, A++, would contribute to advancing scientific knowledge to save the entire human race again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _What do we become tryna kill each other?_  
>  _You’re faking it son, gonna get you tonight_  
>  _I suck another breath to the hearts of the Revolution_  
>  _Coz you[still ain’t right](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl3QoD6wiDI)._

_“I really feel like this year can just fuck the fuck off already.”_

April. They’re in a temporary base just outside Magadan, at the invitation of the Russian government, because this is where the model says to be. It’s fuck-off freezing and while Newt doesn’t really feel the cold, Hermann sure as shit does, and he’s a miserable old bastard about it, which is making Newt a miserable old bastard, too.

Two of the refurbished Russian Jaeger loom off in the distance, waiting by the coast, just in case, and everyone in fake-LOCCENT is edgy and and tired and pissed off. This is their fourth deployment in as many weeks. Besuited assholes keep getting up and television and using phrases like “from an abundance of caution” and, oop, they’re off again; flying halfway ‘round the world to stand and look authoritative at whatever site whatever politician thinks might be the next k-virus outbreak or stabilization or photo op or what-the-fuck-ever. And, yeah, they’re getting paid and it is, technically, their job but Newt’s always hated flying and Hermann hates it more and this whole thing where they grew up and got promoted and have _responsibilities_ right now? Can fuck right the fuck outta here. If Newt had wanted this shit he would’ve stayed in academia.

“No you wouldn’t’ve,” Hermann says, from somewhere in Newt’s armpit. “You loathed it.” He’s currently using Newt as a space-heater-slash-windbreak, which is working out okay, even though standing is hurting him and sitting is worse. Newt’s about ready to pick him up whether he approves or not, and is only holding off because Hermann really, _really_ does not approve when there are other people watching.

 _“I liked teaching,”_ Newt tells him, which is true. _“And research.”_ It was just . . . everything else that fucking sucked.

“I suppose it would be different, if we went back now.”

_“Yeah, like. Hard to do lectures when you can’t fucking talk.”_

“Ah, yes. A completely unique and insurmountable hardship that has never before been overcome by any scientist at any institution this century.” Newt rolls his eyes, all of them, but there’s . . . something there, at the back of Hermann’s mind. Wiring diagrams and code shit and Hermann is saying: “You could be a rockstar, quite literally.”

Newt’s getting pretty good at simultaneously playing both his guitar and a keyboard he modified into two parts for his big hands, and his YouTube channel does okay. He’s even had a few offers of collaboration from a bunch of acts he’s had to put off because of, like, the whole saving the world thing.

_“You’ve thought about this, huh?”_

Hermann gives in to the pain and the cold and leans has bad side fully against Newt’s chest. Newt shifts his arms so he’s taking most of Hermann’s weight—but, like, discretely—tilting his head to keep the dusting of snow from Hermann’s hair.

“I have to believe this will end,” Hermann says. “And there’ll be something after. For Lena, if nothing else.” They don’t talk about it, and definitely not in front of Lena, but Newt knows the only reason Vans didn’t, well, terminate was because they closed the Breach. Thought it was going to be the end of things. And then it wasn’t, and it isn’t that Hermann regrets it, exactly—he loves his daughter, like, full-on heart-eyes shit—but . . . they might not’ve made the same choice. If they’d known what was coming next.

 _“They’re not going to stop coming, you know that right? Sometimes I don’t think they know_ how _to.”_

“Then we close the doors, or we take away their key. Or . . . make our own, and we take the fight to them.”

And Hermann is _serious_. It isn’t just shit he’s saying, isn’t just wishful thinking. _“You think . . . you think we could open a Breach? From this end?”_

“I know this may surprise you but I do, actually, do work at work, yes.”

 _“I thought you were working on, y’know. The h-field stuff!”_ Yeah, if Newt goes brain-spelunking he can go find all the shit Hermann knows and know it himself in a heartbeat, and Hermann can do the same to him. But, fuck theoretical math shit is boring. Newton will never, ever understand the appeal of it.

“Twenty years ago, aliens and traversable wormholes were the stuff of science fiction,” Hermann points out. “We’ve learnt more about both in a generation than in the entire rest of human history combined. Lord knows I wish we’d learnt it in a different way, but . . . yes. If we aren’t able to manufacture usable, for want of a better word, ‘portals’ within a decade I will finally agree to sing karaoke with you like you’ve always wanted.”

Newt’s eyes narrow. _“Five years,”_ he counters because, yeah. He knows Hermann. And he knows how adamantly Hermann has refused to sing in public, even though he actually has a pretty great—if untrained—voice. And Newt? Newt can _totally_ help with that last bit.

Oh god they are _totally_ going to form a band and jam together and Hermann is _totally_ going to make magic space portals and it is going to be. So. Awesome.

And Hermann smiles, and lifts one of Newt’s small hands, and presses a kiss against the knuckles. And in the distance, beyond the looming shadows of the Jaeger and the churning dark of the ocean, the sun begins to rise, and Newt can believe that maybe, someday, everything will work out.

* * *

John-fucking-Stone is still a goddamn dipass, though. Albeit a useful one. Medically speaking.

“Congratulations,” Newt tells him in May, via Hermann’s voice. “You are officially the longest-surviving k-positive patient on the planet.”

This gets him a raised eyebrow. Newt wouldn’t say their relationship has gotten better, exactly, in the last few months, but Stone is definitely coming around to the fact he is not, in fact, going to melt into a puddle of blue goo and he has Newt to thank for it.

“Don’t look at me, dude; doesn’t count. I’d checked out of my mansuit long before where you’re at. How do you feel?”

“Like shit. What the fuck are you doing to me?” Injections, every two weeks. Keeping the k-virus at bay _and_ purging it from his system. Slowly. Phase III, in other words; the holy grail. Still a few missing pieces, namely whatever the fuck had been in that jet injector, too degraded for Newt’s team to fully replicate. Whatever it was, it’d fucked with Newt’s Phase II treatment something chronic but, well, they’d got this instead. Closer than they’ve ever been before.

“Still pissing blue?”

“Not recently.” Stone’s lost maybe twenty kilos since he got here. All the k-virus augmented bulk and then some. But, plusses for him, he’s alive.

“Good. Means you’re probably nearly back to full-human. Gonna let us take a biopsy in the next few days to check? I know they suck.”

Stone shrugs. “What’m I gonna get for it if I do?”

“The glowing sense of satisfaction that you’re contributing to advancing scientific knowledge that will save the entire human race. Strong recommend, by the way; great feeling, A++, would contribute to advancing scientific knowledge to save the entire human race again.”

“Take your goddamn biopsy.”

“Attaboy.”

“Have—” Stone stops himself, looks away. He’s curled up in the corner on his bed-bench, blanket pulled up against the chills he can’t quite get rid of, no matter how high they turn up the heat.

“Mm?”

“Forget it.”

“Aw, c’mon champ. I’m curious, now. I though we were friends.” Which earns him an absolute _withering_ stare and, wow. Okay. It suddenly occurs to Newt the last person he had this kind of relationship with he ended up being in a weird mind-parasite-facilitated xeno sex hive with which . . . ew. No. Absolutely not.

 _(Hermann, slamming the mute button on his microphone just long enough to sneer: “Dear Lord, Newton, do not_ even _.”)_

So yeah okay, note to self: brain bleach right after this. But, also, Stone asks:

“Have they told you what . . . what happens to me? After this?”

And . . . okay. Wow. Not the question Newt was expecting. They don’t really talk about . . . that. There are other people for that. So he stops, lowers the tablet he’s been tapping notes into, and, for once, thinks before he answers.

“Like, for reals?” A shrug, so: “Dude, like. Sorry not sorry but you are _never_ getting out of here. Best case, HQ transfers you somewhere you might actually get to see the sky once in a while, and maybe you get to write a book or something. I mean it’s not just that you’re on the hook for international bioterrorism, it’s that like basically every country in the world is gonna be sending assassins after you the second you’re not buried at the bottom of an impenetrable bunker and guarded by literally the most dangerous weapons on Earth. Either ‘cause they’re pissed you killed their citizens, or they’re scared you’ll tattle they had you kill someone _else’s_ citizens, or both. And that’s if you’re lucky. I mean shit, dude. There’s a reason I’m literally the only person allowed physically in here, and it’s not actually for my benefit.” Which, irony. Because yeah, it’s not like Newt doesn’t have very personal, very painful reasons to want John-fucking-Stone dead.

“I didn’t—” Stone stops himself, visibly biting his lips to keep the words inside.

“Like, I dunno if they told you this, but two of your buddies turned up dead in their cells and a third is _poof_! Just vanished in broad fucking daylight. Which, like. Condolences.”

“They don’t know anything,” Stone snaps. “They didn’t— It didn’t work like that.”

And, of course. Of fucking course. Three months of professional interrogators and it’s fucking _Newt_ the dude opens up to.

_(Mute again: “It’s not unexpected. Men are far more likely to crack to kindness than any other form of pressure.”)_

Which, again, irony. Because Newt’s been accused of being a lot of things in his time,but “kind” generally isn’t one. It’s not like he thinks he’s a bad person or anything; he tries not to be, when it counts. But he’s also lived with himself for, like, four decades now. He knows what he’s like.

“Yeah, sure,” Newt says, when Hermann’s done with his aside. “But, dude. You’re the biggest fish we’ve got. No one thinks you’re like the mastermind here, but for a fall guy? Close enough for rock ’n’ roll. And if not you, them.”

Stone nods, and is quiet long enough Newt goes back to his tablet. And then:

“Johannes Steyn.”

“Huh?” Newt looks up.

“My name,” says apparently Johannes Steyn, né John Stone. “That’s . . . that’s my name.” And he shrugs, still looking at the wall, like this is no big deal when Newt knows, just _knows_ , the observers and the lawyers and the interrogators are all going to lose their fucking _shit_.

“Well then, Hans,” says Newt, who never met a name he couldn’t shorten or a situation he wouldn’t do it in. “Great to finally meet.”

* * *

And then, finally, in July, it happens.

It’s Sunday, 11:46am. Newt is dozing in the lab pool while Herman makes squeaky marker noises, working out some magical math portal thing on the boards. They’re alone for once, the rest of their staff either experiencing work-life balance or sneaking away to K2.

It’s been . . . an okay week. It’s okay. Last month they got in a half-dozen new k-virus cases from the outbreak in Suva and all but two of them have consented to the trial of the new Phase III treatment. Newt still thinks they haven’t got the accelerant totally nailed down so he had a long talk with all the volunteers, about how this likely wouldn’t work and may suck more for them than if they’d opted out. A woman named Selai had pointed out they were going to die or worse regardless, so if there was even a small chance, they may as well take it. Newt had told her that, had he still had lips, he would’ve kissed her, to which she’d laughed and scolded him and called him a cad and told him to go home to “his beautiful family.” So he had, and the trial is going . . . okay. Probably not “volunteers survive” okay, but . . . closer. Definitely closer.

And then, a week ago? Steyn-not-Stone had finished negotiating his deal and had started talking. Newt doesn’t know all the details and, quite frankly, doesn’t want to. Plus the whole operation had been super compartmentalized so it’s not like Steyn’s been able to give them everything. But they have _something_ , which is as close as they’ve yet to get since this whole shitshow started.

So yeah. July. Still shit, but . . . better. And Hermann’s marker is squeaking and Newt is half asleep, dreaming half-formed dreams that maybe they should actually _do_ something for once. Like . . . go into the city? Watch a film? They still make films, right? Surely. Herms can go grab lunch, and they can laze around and watch fictional people have fictional problems for once, and then also probably cuddle, and it’s about then—just when things are getting good enough that the marker’s stopped squeaking in interest—that the _fucking K-Watch alarm goes off_ for the first time since the fucking Breach closed.

* * *

They make it to LOCCENT in record time, mostly because Newt runs them, still dripping wet and leaving a big damp streak down Hermann’s sweatervest and trousers from where he’s swallowed his pride for once and is catching a lift. Even still, they burst into a scene of already extant panic, people so busy yelling into comms and at monitors that their arrival is barely even registered.

Barely even registered by anyone except Hansen, who mostly notices because he’s halfway through yelling at a j-tech to go find them.

“You!” He points at Newt as he says it. “Where? Now!”

Newt doesn’t have to ask what he means. K-Watch was disbanded after the Breach closed and it’s only in the last few months they’ve started reestablishing it. Mostly automated systems, which are what’s been tripped; high energy and seismic readings consistent with a Breach-opening, except they’ve scrambled half a dozen ROVs and still have nothing on visuals. And that’s the problem, because:

“Nowhere?”

“What?”

“Nowhere!” Newt repeats, with his big hands this time. “I can’t . . . There’s nothing!”

Hansen stares at him, incredulous, then at Hermann who shifts awkwardly and says, “I . . . would concur with this, yes.”

“Well . . . listen bloody harder!”

“It doesn’t _work_ like that! Trust me, if they were here, I’d know.” A Breach opening, a proper Breach opening, is one of the many, many things that keeps Newt up at night. They still don’t really understand how the Anteverse’s hooks into the hive mind actually work—mostly because Newt keeps cutting out the relevant part of his brain before he can check, and Aurora’s was damaged to start with—only that it seems to, for want of a better word, “broadcast” even across dimensions. Which is, a) fucked up, and b) would be amazingly useful if they could actually reverse-engineer it into something, i) usable, and ii) that wouldn’t send its operators mad. Point being, though, that’s all when the Breach is _closed_. When it’s open, when there’s actually a clear hole punched between the two worlds . . . well. Newt worries he wouldn’t be able to resist that, if push really came to shove. Particularly with one or more daikaiju on this side, acting as giant signal boo _ooooh my god—_

“It was a distraction,” Hermann finishes the though for him.

“What?”

Hermann is staring at readings, light glinting off his fussy grandma glasses. “These aren’t right,” he says. “It’s been some time and it’s possible they’ve . . . adapted their technology, but . . .”

 _“No. They didn’t really open it.”_ That’s why Newt didn’t feel anything, why nothing came through.

“Not fully, no.”

“Out loud, boys,” Hansen reminds them.

“We believe the Breach was not fully opened,” Hermann says. “Whatever this was, it was . . . something else.”

“Something like what?”

“I would have to run some calculations to be sure—”

“Give me the unsure version. We need _something_.”

“I believe they may be . . . moving it.”

“Moving the Breach?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t _know_!” Hermann snaps, throwing up his hands. “This is all very . . . I need _time_.”

“You’ve had time,” Hansen points out. “Nearly a bloody decade of it. Now the exam’s over, pencils down, hand in your papers.”

Hermann’s hands fly across the console, through the projections, pale and long-fingered and beautiful. “Based on some preliminary modeling, coupled with the energy readings . . . I believe—and I do stress this is an _extremely_ rough estimate—that the new opening could be anywhere within . . . within five thousand kilometers of Challenger Deep.”

“That—” the Marshal starts, then turns to shout: “Choi! Give me a—”

“On it!” Tendo calls back, and suddenly they’re standing beneath a projection of the world, a big ugly red circle stretching from Sakhalin in the north, to Myanmar in the west, to the bottom of mainland Australia in the south.

“That,” Hansen says, “does not narrow it down.”

The are millions of people inside that circle. Maybe a billion. The whole of Japan, most of Australia, Indonesia, all of eastern China, and . . .

_“Here. They’re moving it here.”_

Hermann snaps his head around so fast he hits himself in the cheek with his own glasses chain. “You can’t know that.”

 _“I don’t, but . . .”_ But they’re the threat. And the Anteverse . . . the Anteverse doesn’t understand humanity, not really. There are too many differences there, too much _alienness_. Newt’s not even convinced the Anteverse sees humanity as alive, exactly, in the same way they don’t see the kaiju as alive. Just meat machines, no more a living entity than a Jaeger.

But they understand patterns, and they remember losses. They scout and they probe and they gather information and, more importantly, Newt is here and Aurora is here and they’d know that. Maybe more; Newt’s not exactly sure how much of what _he_ perceives or thinks or knows is available to the Anteverse, or how much they can interpret of what they get. In Newt’s experience the Anteverse is not very interested, as it were, in two-way dialogue but, more than that, their link into the hive mind is . . . parasitic. Unnatural. Newt feels that viscerally, now, and Aurora had confirmed it; he could understand Aurora because he was in the hive and so was she and because they were both there together things just . . . worked. Like two compounds reacting, exchanging atoms, different but compatible. Forming something new between them. On top of that, the Anteverse is . . . like being blasted by something outside of the periodic table entirely. Something overwhelming and inescapable and _wrong_.

And then, from the far side of LOCCENT, someone says:

“Uh. Marshal? You might wanna . . . you might wanna look at this.”

They all do. “This” turns out to be security camera footage from the front gate. It shows people. A crowd, maybe a thousand or so, standing in the road, swaying slightly in a way too coordinated to be natural. And Newt thinks:

_“Oh, no.”_

And _then_ the world tears open, and the outside floods in.

* * *

Hermann feels it too, of course. Once-removed, so not as . . . visceral. But no more pleasant for it.

It’s like two astronauts, Hermann sometimes thinks. Spinning in zero gravity, halfway-blow from an airlock door. Hermann is holding the door, and Newt is holding Hermann, and so long as nothing changes, nothing _will_ change.

And then the Anteverse opens its back hole maw right before them, and Newton . . . slips.

Hermann screams—he seems to be doing so much of that, this year—maybe Newton’s name, maybe a denial, maybe a warning. And he _sees_ it, the moment conscious though blinks from Newton’s eyes, expression dropping, pupils pulling closed. It’s not like the road, like after the rocket. That had been . . . strange, and perhaps a little embarrassing, the way Newton had bounded towards him like an over-eager puppy. But Newton running on one brain had merely been a stripped-back version of Newton on two; animal and immediate, but still recognizably _himself_.

This is . . . not that. This is something Hermann has seen only once before, and had wished to never see again. This is Newton’s body, driven by something _else_.

Newt rears up, stumbling backwards, crashing through consoles, roaring.

Everyone scrambles, getting out of his way, fleeing to the far side of the room. Still barking orders into coms because, Lord help them, it’s happening. Triple Event, hit on three sides; Newton, inside LOCCENT, an army of kaijin at the door, and outside . . . outside, in the bay . . .

They have weapons, now. To kill kaijin. It won’t be like before. It Newton is . . . lost. If he hurts people . . . The Marshal is a good man, and surprisingly patient with them both, but he won’t sacrifice the world for one person. When the time comes, he will pull that trigger himself, and not regret it.

There is no time. No time for simulations, for calculations, for probabilities. Hermann has faced down this moment twice before, and knows how it goes.

He steps forward. “Newton.”

“Doctor!” Hanson yells. “Get back!”

Hermann ignores him; stares straight up into mindless blue eyes, as empty as the void, and pulls himself as tall and straight as he can go.

“Newton,” he snaps. “Stop this! Immediately!”

An enormous claw closes around him, lifting him from the ground. Bringing him level with a glowing, slavering, split-mandible maw, teeth as big as his hand. And he can _feel_ the roar as it builds; the close, it will deafen him at minimum, perhaps even kill. And he does the only thing he can, and raises his hand, and slaps Newton right across the snout.

“Newton!”

It can’t possibly hurt, but it is enough to startle; Newt’s jaw clicking shut and head jerking back. Herman gets one outraged blink and, then, somewhere beneath the roaring, static hum:

_“ . . . Hermann?”_

One tiny pinprick of riotous light, of life, at the centre of the maddening, devouring swarm.

 _Got you,_ thinks Hermann. And then lets go of the airlock, and drops into the void.

* * *

Their body slumps into their claw, unoccupied but not lifeless, as the hideous dead-dark drone recedes, pushed out by the force of two, no space left for it to fill.

 _Yes,_ they think. _Okay._ It’s like before but . . . not. Closer. Smoother. _Is this what it feels like? The hundredth time? The thousandth? No this is . . . this is something else. Something new. This is . . ._

_This is Us, huh?_

They put down the body, gently, rolled onto its good side, limbs locked, head back. It will be needed, later. _Yeah wow you accidentally choking to death on your unconscious body’s spit is not how I was imagining this would go. Yes thank you, all right._

“Newt?”

They look up. Hansen looks back. Half of LOCCENT looks back, frightened, rifles located and raised.

“It’s okay,” they sign. “We can . . . hold it back. Like this.” _For a little while. Long enough to kick some ass!_

Hansen’s eyes go, somehow, even wider. He was a pilot. He knows what this is.

On the displays, behind Hansen’s head, they see their new brother, mindless and mad, newly birthed into the world.

_Beautiful. He’s beautiful._

Their quiet contemplation is apparently sufficiently in-character, and Hansen barks for everyone to get back to work. _Everyone who’s workstations I didn’t trash. I’m sure Hansen will make you clean it up when this is done._

When it’s done. When they survive. Right. Sure.

The Marshal is sending two Jaeger to the bay, sending the ground troops to the door, to protect the ‘Dome. And suddenly they know what they have to do, where they need to be.

“New— Uh, Doctors! Get back here!” Hansen shouts at them as they make for the door. They turn, flailing, too many brains trying to control too many limbs— _no no you don’t need to let me good Lord how do you even manage just_ —and throw out a, “We can help!” before they’re off, Hansen’s cursing following them down the hall.

The mad droning—ignorable, now, but ever-present—grows louder as they approach the Shatterdome’s entrance. They crash through into a deployment of grim-faced Rangers who, of all things, brighten to see them.

“Doctor Geiszler!” one says, and they don’t correct her.

They don’t go out the front door; that would be foolish. The Shatterdome is a bunker and the PPDC has spent the last year reinforcing it against human-sized enemies, too. There are turrets and garrisons and they follow the Rangers as they scramble into positions. The ground beneath is a sea of writhing blue-black, the kaijin shredding their human skins as they scramble madly against the bunker walls. They cast out into the Hive, desperately, searching for a light amidst the dark, and can’t help the howl of despair when they find none. _This is . . . I_ told _you! This is everyone we’ve missed. Maybe for years. Maybe since the start of this oh god what if the virus_ always _worked? What if— Enough! Enough. Think of this later. Dude fucking zombie fucking kaiju hordes were not on the crib sheet man! What the actual—_

“Doc? You got anything for us?” The Ranger . . . Angela. They remember her, from Nathan road. A pilot, but this, too. She hands them a notepad with an apologetic wince. “Sorry. I’m still a bit rusty . . .”

_There’s no one out there. Just bodies._

Their handwriting looks strange to them. Not quite an indecipherable scrawl, not quite over-precise loops.

Angela’s shoulders droop as she reads it. “We’ll let the others know. That really sucks, you know?”

They nod. They do know.

“What . . . what are they _doing_ out there?”

_Expected to be let in._

“Who would—” Angela starts, before stopping herself, eyes wide. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

They shrug. _It’s okay. We’re okay._ They’re not sure how much of their little . . . episode was broadcast over the comms, but they suspect it wasn’t nothing.

“Well . . . fuck them, right?” And she slaps them on the shoulder, playful camaraderie. “You’re one of us, Doc. They can’t have you.”

And . . . later. They’ll think about that later.

_We need to get into the city._

A raised eyebrow. “You know there’s a—?” They nod, so: “Right, right. That’s probably why, huh? Uh, well. I’m guessing you’ve gotta go the hard way, so . . . we’ll cover you?”

 _This is_ unconscionably _dangerous. What you suddenly know how to fly a helicopter? No, there must be— C’mon, man. Running through a field of zombies while dudes shoot at us? You can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to— I absolutely can and I absolutely will! Liar._

And they’re already up on the parapet, staring at the vertiginous drop below.

_This is far too high! We can’t possibly— Relax, dude, we got this._

And behind them, Angela is yelling: “All right, grunts! Doc’s going over the edge! Give him cover and try not to shoot him while you’re at it!”

_This is absolutely the worst—_

And they drop. And they roar, half joy and half terror, as every grotesquely mangled face beneath them looks up.

They drive a claw into the wall about ten meters off the ground, calculating velocity and deceleration almost unconsciously. It slows the drop, doesn’t stop it, and they hit the ground hard enough to flatten two kaijin beneath their feet. They send two more flying with a swipe of their big claw, a third slamming into the Shatterdome wall with a small hand, hard enough to crush its empty skull.

_See? We got this. Easy._

And it’s true; it is, after all, what their body was made for. A mindless weapon sharped and honed even further with hours of careful practice. Second nature now, code smooth and correct.

The ground to either side of them explodes with bullets as they book it for the torn-down gate, kaijin hot on their tail. They understand now, they think; the kaijin follow them because they were _made_ to follow them. In rage and fury or mindless obedience, they’re not sure it matters. They run, and the horde follows, away from the ‘Dome, explosions following in their wake.

 _Dude you can’t lead them into the city what are you— No, not the city. Listen._ Feel _._

And they can; a shuddering, deep-bass booming, getting closer, shaking the ground.

_Past the gate. Give them room._

The road leading to the Dome, Pan Pacific Way, is wide and empty, and they hurtle down the centre of it, horde in tow, ground shaking faster and closer and they count it; one step, two steps. And then a shadow falls over them, unfathomably huge, and they stop and turn.

And Gipsy Danger brings her foot down onto the horde.

There are stragglers, and they finish them off. The Jaeger helps, crouching down, crushing with giant fingers. It’s awful work, but then it’s done; pavement washed with pulverized blue viscera. They can still feel stragglers in the woods, but with the horde gone the Rangers will clear the rest. For now, they stare up into the enormous blank Conn-Pod of Gipsy Danger, as enormous hands move to say:

“Going our way?”

They nod, and scramble up onto a huge palm when it’s offered. This time, the rise is even more vertiginous than their fall, inertia forcing them flat against Gipsy Danger’s palm. It is . . . not the most comfortable ride they’ve ever taken. They’re cupped close and safe against the Jaeger’s chest but she still runs in stomach-lurching arcs, sea-spray crashing and soaking their hide and making the surface beneath their claws slick and hard to hold. And yet, despite that, it is still the most deliriously joyful thing they’ve ever experienced. They whoop from the sheer emotion of it, a strange ululation they don’t think they’ve ever before had cause to loose, sound swallowed beneath the thunder of feet and the roar of machinery.

And then they round the isle, and the daikaiju comes into view.

He is . . . he is beautiful. Magnificent. This close, the Anteverse buzz is almost overwhelming—the pressure beneath their gut feels like a physical thing, has them bent double—but they force it back. Focus on themselves, on the incredible machine beneath their claws, on the awesome curve of the kaiju’s flytrap jaws. The smell of salt and oil, the glare of the midday sun. Here, present. In control.

They jump off onto the Kodak Building when it’s brought close, claws gripped into the building’s vertical side as they clamber to the roof with ease, Gipsy Danger turning to join the fight in the bay.

The second Jaeger is Banshee Zero, the Larsons’s, and she’s holding her own, trying to keep the kaiju in the water, away from the city. Distracted, Gipsy Danger catches it in the side with a volley from her plasmacaster, and it howls and stumbles, bioluminescence flashing in a way that has them narrowing their eyes from where they watch, transfixed.

_That’s not good. Gotta be something . . ._

Another hit, another flash, and the kaiju’s head peels open like a grotesque-magnificent, saw toothed flower. There’s another head beneath, red and wet and raw, and the hum is a scream but beneath it, in the Hive, the true Hive, they can feel—

_Fuck! They need to know, how do we—_

_(They’re wheeling the Doctor’s body into the infirmary, stable but unconscious, when he lurches up and gasps, in a voice not quite his own: “Kinetic energy. It absorbs the energy. Tell them to— the Icepick—” And then he’s gone, and—)_

—and they don’t get another one of those. The hum is a roar, the wave a tsunami, and their claws have already started digging into the ceiling below, trying to get the meat inside to crush and kill and _okay it’s okay we’re back they know they know_ and they stop, scramble to their feet, back to the edge.

They’ve been noticed. The daikaiju sees them, throws Banshee Zero at Gipsy Danger with a thunderous crash as both Jaeger go down into the bay. And then he’s coming, a wall of mad empty rage and something—something small, something hurt—curled beneath.

 _“Come on! Come get it motherfuckers!”_ They scream at him, _beyond_ him, with their throat and with their mind and they’ve done this, too. Faced down unfathomable violence and they’ve learnt, from every loss and every failure. And word in the ‘Dome travels fast, because when Banshee Zero throws herself into the fray she tackles the kaiju around the neck, forcing him down, into the bay, kicking his limbs from out beneath him and for a moment they felt a jolt of pride because, yeah. The Larsons leant that move on them.

It doesn’t last long, the kaiju lurching upright, unfathomably strong, but Gipsy Danger is on him as well, arm raised and reassembling into the thin, violent spike of the NP-0, the Icepick, a brutal name for a brutal surgery, and she slams it down, right on target, right where they taught her, into the point between the hip and spine.

The kaiju’s pupils contract, in pain and in shock, as a blast of plasma destroys tissue from within, and a terrible leash is finally severed.

They feel it too, a rubber-band snapback on a universal scale, the force of it dropping them to their knees, like suddenly being relieved of an incalculable weight.

 _“Yes!”_ They scream and they roar, deliriously victorious, into a silence suddenly louder than the hum it replaced. _“Go fuck yourselves! We win, motherfuckers! You ain’t got_ shit _!”_

And in the bay, a creature opens its eyes, truly opens them, for the first time. Weight on it is back and pain its hip, and so much _light_ , everywhere, and a binary-star of joy, erupting like a supernova, tiny-huge, impossibly small yet incredibly large, and they are terrifying, and elating and when they turn their regard it is hit by _so much_ , a whole new universe, and a thought forms for the first time, not quite a word, not quite emotion, and rises like a mountain and that thought is:

“BROTHER?”

* * *

Newt calls him Otouto.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... and then they all lived happily ever after forever and ever amen.
> 
> So-oo-oo yeah. Welcome to what happens when you get hit with apocalypse-level fires, hailstorms, _and_ a global pandemic all in like three months, and you're talking about it with a friend, who literally just finished chemo before his city got locked down, and he tells you, "The way things are going, I'm expecting Godzilla to rise from the ocean by November." And you think, "... hey. I once wrote a fic about that." So then you re-read your fic and wince at the fact you wrote the line “the year is 2020 and the world is still ending” in 2016. And then you finish it, new canon notwithstanding (lol second film what second film), because for once you actually remembered where you were going with a series.
> 
> This is compressing what probably should've been a few separate stories into one, because lol pacing what pacing. Otouto was always going to show up at some point, but his originally intended design got swapped out for Raijin's. The originally intended subplot with Aurora's brain also got quietly shuffled aside partly for time and partly because it ended up being way too similar to the film (believe it or not, one of the original ideas was that she'd end up in a Jaeger, because yes I too watched _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ growing up, and ref. also _Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S._ , et al.).
> 
> Also, for the sake of verisimilitude I feel obliged to point out the Kodak Building probably isn't _quite_ the right height for how it's written here (and also there's a big ol' road in front of it), but, uh... just pretend in this 'verse it's a few stories shorter for Artistic Convenience Reasons.
> 
> So yeah. Thanks for reading, particularly anyone coming back to this after so many years, and I hope 2020 hasn't been to brutal for you. 💜
> 
>  _Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land_  
>  _And don't criticize what you don't understand_  
>  _Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command_  
>  _Your old road is rapidly agin'_  
>  _So get out of the way if you can't lend your hand_  
>  _For the times,[they are a-changin'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV51gU00oqc)._


End file.
